magazines

The Jefferson County Radio Amateur Club is reporting that 73 (also known as 73 Amateur Radio Today) is now available in full at the Internet archive. Direct URL at http://www.archive.org/details/73-magazine; it looks like the archive has been there for about two weeks. The magazine ran from 1960 to 2003; according to the Internet Archive there are 511 back issues available here.

If you’ve ever used the Internet archive this will look familiar to you; full magazine copies are available in a variety of formats, including online-readable, PDF, ePub, and Kindle. The issue I test downloaded was about 21MB, but the older ones from the mid-70s looked like they were over 50MB.

You can do a full-text search for the archives if you go to the Internet Archive advanced search and specify 73-Magazine as the collection to be searched. I did a search for antenna (you can use the search here to start your own search) and got over 280 results.

Steve Jobs in a 1976 copy of 73 Magazine

I don’t know too much about amateur radio, but I’m enough of a computer nerd to appreciate the diy hardware hacking and electronics articles (and the ancient advertising — the two page Altair 8800b advertisement carried me away on a wave of old-computer nostalgia.) If you get lucky you’ll also find a computing easter egg or two; an article in one of the issues I downloaded featured an article on an event called Personal Computing ’76 with a few paragraphs about (and a picture of) a 20-year-old computing guy named Steve Jobs.

The Internet Archive’s usual good work; a huge, easily-accessible collection for ham radio operators, early computer enthusiasts, and electronics hobbyists.

A couple years ago I covered a Web site called Old Magazine Articles. Its URL is http://www.oldmagazinearticles.com, natch. When I reviewed it the site was mostly focused on pre-1922 events/materials, but since then has expanded somewhat, so I wanted to give you a quick update.

If you visit the site a lot you can go to the recent pages section to see what’s new on the site, but if you’re not head to the front page, where you’ll get a search box and a list of topic headings, from 1925: Wind Power to World War II. I picked Animation, a subtopic of Movies.

I found ten articles, mostly from the 1930s. The articles have title, source, date, and a good summary. The articles themselves are available as PDFs — just click on the title.

This is not a university or other institution putting this together — it’s just a guy who likes historical materials and is willing to take the time to put them online. So there’s not as much here as you’d find in a university database, but the summaries are terrific and there’s plenty here to browse.

I will not give in to the easy puns! But I will give in to the urge to stare at shiny rocks. Soooo shiny… the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) has launched The Gem Project, available at http://www.gia.edu/research-resources/gia-gem-database/. This site is based on the data from the Edward J. Gübelin collection of gemstones and it’s an interesting mix of browsable information and downloadable PDF. According to a story in National Jeweler, about 1,000 of the stones in the Gübelin collection have had data cataloged.

From the front page of the site you can choose to browse beryls, corundums, garnets, spinels, or tourmalines. Picking a category of stone will give you a list of specimens from that category; I’d say there were about fifty total. Each item listed has a brilliant picture, but to get details about it you have to click on the item number, which gives you the option to download a PDF file!

The PDF files I looked at were two pages with a description of the item, gemological properties, and photomicrograph data. (Today’s word, kids, is diaphaneity.)

I read an article in Wired last week that made me very happy: Popular Science is now online as entire archive, and it’s free! The magazine has teamed up with Google Books to make its archive available.

I did a search for intitle:”Popular Science” monsters and got 547 results, from “New evidence spurs hunt for Loch Ness monster‎” to “SPLIT Logs Easily, Without Expensive Splitters, Monster Mauls.” Results include a thumbnail of the cover and details about which issue it is. It doesn’t look like you can get results by order of date, which is unfortunate — looks like results are in order of relevance.

Google Books (or in this case Magazines) still drives me a bit nuts because of the ways that you can’t sort results, and sometimes the “scrolling down” through the pages makes me overshoot things I want to read, but man, they’re adding some great content.

Hot diggity biscuit! A software engineer at Google noticed there was a Facebook group called “Get Google Magazine Search to provide a list of indexed titles” (I wish I had known about that one, I would have joined!) and took some time to actually make a page on Google Books that lists all the available magazine titles.

The list of titles is at http://books.google.com/books?as_pt=MAGAZINES&rview=1. This is a cover/grid view; there’s also a list view if you prefer. You can filter the magazines displayed by those which have full view only and those which are public domain only. I didn’t see any magazines that were listed as public domain only, but when I restricted my results to those magazines which were full view, I got several dozen titles, from The Alcalade to Yoga. Some highlights (to me anyway): Billboard, Dwell, Popular Mechanics, and Popular Science.

This is great! I’m so glad that you can see all the magazines that are available on Google Books (and I’m astonished and happy there are so many!) Now for the next possible trick — how about being able to search a set of magazines at a time? (Instead of just one of them or all of them?)